WHAT'S THAT SMELL?

Nearly everyone has heard of the
corruption-plagued organization ACORN. Yet many gun owners are unaware
of the organization's strong anti-gun activities and ties

America's 1st Freedom, Dec. 2009

By
Dave Kopel

Question: Who is responsible for the worst anti-gun law so far in 2009?

Answer: the Association of Community Organizations for Reform
Now--ACORN--perhaps the most notoriously corrupt organization in American
politics.

This
unfortunate story begins in Jersey City, N.J., which, like ACORN, has a
long history of corruption and of suppression of liberty. From 1917 to
1947, Frank Hague was the mayor of Jersey City. In The Soprano State:
New Jersey's Culture of Corruption, Bob Ingle and Sandy McClure call
him "the granddaddy of Jersey bosses."

Although he never had any legal income other than his mayoral salary of
$8,500 per year, Hague amassed a multimillion-dollar fortune.

His
political machine, known as "the organization," made him a powerhouse in
national Democratic Party politics. Like ACORN, Hague's "organization"
perpetrated massive voter fraud.

For
example, in 1937, there were 147,000 people of voting age living in
Jersey City, but there were 160,050 registered voters there. Though
impressive for its time, the scale of this duplicity was tiny in
comparison to ACORN's alleged submission in 2008 of at least 400,000
fraudulent registrations nationwide.

"Boss" Hague held the Constitution in contempt. "I am the law!" he
declared in 1937.

In a
1938 speech to the Jersey City Chamber of Commerce, he railed, "We hear
about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time
I hear those words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red, that man is a
Communist.' You never heard a real American talk in that manner."

In
the 1939 case Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization, the
Supreme Court ruled against a Hague ordinance that forbade labor unions
from holding meetings or distributing leaflets in public places in the
city. Hague v. CIOis one of the founding cases for Supreme Court
use of the 14th Amendment to require local governments to obey the Bill
of Rights.

The
victory of the Constitution over the Jersey City "organization" helped
pave the way, in the long run, for the current Supreme Court case that
will decide whether Chicago and other local governments must obey the
Second Amendment.

Jersey City enjoyed a period of competent government and genuine reform
from 1993 to 2001, with Mayor Bret Schundler. Schundler ran for governor
in 2001 but was defeated by James McGreevey, a determined anti-gun
advocate who later resigned in disgrace after the exposure of his
corruption.

The
year after Schundler left the mayor's office, Jersey City reverted to
its anti-constitutional habits, participating in a Brady Center junk
lawsuit against lawful firearm manufacturers.

In
June 2006, the Jersey City government put itself in the vanguard of
rights suppression, adopting a "one handgun per month" law. The
rights-rationing law applied solely to the one licensed firearm dealer
in the city, Caso's Gun-a-Rama.

NRA
Director Scott Bach, Caso's and the Association of New Jersey Rifle and
Pistol Clubs (ANJRPC) fought back. They brought a lawsuit that argued
the New Jersey state legislature had pre-empted local laws on gun sales.
The New Jersey state law regarding licensing for firearm owners and
police permission for gun purchases had set up a comprehensive scheme of
regulation.

The
legislature had determined when and how guns could be sold in New
Jersey, and a city government had no authority to override the
legislature's decisions. After all, local governments derive all their
powers from the state government.

Under
New Jersey law, if you want to buy a gun, you need to get a permit from
your local chief of police. According to New Jersey law, "Only one
handgun shall be purchased on each permit, but a person shall not be
restricted as to the number of rifles or shotguns he may purchase."

If
you wanted to buy a second handgun, you would have to ask your police
chief for an additional permit. If the police chief considered a
person's repeated requests for permits to buy handguns to be suspicious,
he could refuse to issue the permit.

Nobody ever provided evidence that the very few people in Jersey City
who had ever bought more than one handgun in a 30-day period were
engaged in illegal firearms trafficking.

Recognizing that the Jersey City rationing ordinance was pointless, City
Council President Mariano Vega Jr., called it "feel-good legislation
that will probably not reduce crime, but we have to start somewhere, so
I am voting yes."

After
Bach and the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs sued
Jersey City in state trial court, ACORN showed up. Yet the group did
more than just file a friend-of-the-court (amicus) brief in
support of Jersey City. ACORN actually intervened in the case, becoming
a party.

ACORN
told the trial court that its reason for intervening was that "ACORN has
a strong interest in supporting the gun-control ordinance at issue in
this case, because it can help reduce the number of handguns in Jersey
City and therefore reduce the level of gun crime in our neighborhoods."

While
some anti-gun groups deceitfully claim that they support gun ownership,
and are only opposed to gun misuse, ACORN was more frank. Its goal is to
"reduce the number of handguns in Jersey City." That's like intervening
in the Haguecase and announcing a goal "to reduce the number of
labor meetings in Jersey City."

Among
the ACORN legal team was Seton Hall law school professor Linda Fisher,
author of a 2000 article in the Yale Law & Policy Reviewpraising
anti-gun lawsuits.

In
December 2006, the state court judge ruled against the rights-rationing
ordinance. Hudson County Judge Maurice Gallipoli held that the gun
rationing law was pre-empted by the state's pervasive gun-control
system. Further, the judge found, gun rationing was arbitrary,
capricious, irrational and a violation of equal protection of the law.

ACORN
and Jersey City took the case to the appeals court. In the oral
argument, Jersey City's lawyer pointed approvingly to the New York City
law that forbids more than one handgun purchase in a 180-day period. But
the appellate court unanimously ruled against Jersey City and ACORN.

Not
to be dissuaded, ACORN and Jersey City then made a final appeal to the
New Jersey Superior Court, the state's highest court. At this time, the
case is still pending.

Yet
ACORN and the rest of the gun-ban lobby didn't wait for a final
decision. ACORN lawyer Linda Fisher had admitted that rationing firearms
only in Jersey City would just result in handguns being bought
elsewhere. "We would be more than happy if Bayonne or Hoboken would
enact similar ordinances, but in this business it's one step at a time,"
Fisher said.

This
summer, ACORN got what it wanted. ACORN's involvement in the Jersey City
case helped keep the issue in the news and on the political agenda. New
Jersey's incumbent Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine--who is widely disliked by
the citizens of New Jersey for breaking his 2005 campaign promises, for
raising taxes and for making the state government more bloated, wasteful
and expensive than ever--decided he needed an accomplishment to tout for
his 2009 re-election bid.

Because of the structure of New Jersey's Constitution, the state's
governor has far more power than the governor of any other state. With
Corzine's nearly limitless ability to offer inducements and make
threats, the New Jersey legislature narrowly imposed gun rationing on
the state's citizenry.

While the law-abiding citizens of New
Jersey are the greatest victims of ACORN's anti-gun campaign, other
ACORN offices have also been very active foes of the Second Amendment
Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

The North Carolina ACORN chapter has
been lobbying to require all handgun ammunition purchasers to go through
the same background check as firearms purchasers. Such a law could
overwhelm the state's background check system and result in a wait of
many hours just to buy a box of .22-caliber rimfire ammunition at the
local sporting goods store.

According to a Dec. 13, 2008, report
by NBC17 television in Raleigh, "ACORN's initiative ... may even include a
requirement for bullet permits."

In Chicago in March 2006, ACORN and
its local organizer, Rev. Robin Hood, participated in an anti-gun rally
featuring prohibitionists such as Mayor Richard Daley, Gov. Rod
Blagojevich and Congressman Bobby Rush demanding prohibition of
self-loading firearms, which Hood inaccurately described as "automatic
weapons."

The
fact that ACORN is widely involved in anti-gun lobbying and litigation
should not be surprising, since some of the organization's wealthiest
donors also fund other gun-ban groups.

George Soros is the kingpin of the global gun-ban movement. In addition
to ACORN, he has also donated to many other gun-ban organizations. He is
the sugar daddy of the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA),
the international gun prohibition lobby run by his former staffer
Rebecca Peters.

The
Bauman Family Foundation has funded both ACORN and Physicians for Social
Responsibility, a group that promotes various extreme-left causes, such
as unilateral military disarmament, the D.C. handgun ban and many other
items on the Brady Center and Violence Policy Center agendas.

The
Annie E. Casey Foundation showers money on ACORN and on the Appleseed
Foundation. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the D.C. branch of
Appleseed filed a brief in support of the D.C. law banning handguns and
outlawing the use of any gun for self-defense in the home. The New
Jersey branch of Appleseed provided legal assistance to ACORN's anti-gun
work.

Another ACORN funder has been the Bank of America Charitable Foundation,
which has also given money to the Appleseed Foundation

Last
September, ACORN's sleazy modus operandiwas put on public
display by filmmakers James O'Keefe III and Hannah Giles. (Giles' father
is the popular pro-gun columnist and minister Doug Giles.) Using an
undercover camera and microphone, O'Keefe and Giles posed as a pimp and
prostitute who wanted to set up a brothel using underage girls illegally
smuggled into the United States from El Salvador.

They
went to ACORN offices in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Brooklyn, San
Bernardino, Philadelphia, Brooklyn and San Diego. The Philadelphia
office called the police after the pair left, and said that O'Keefe had
caused a "verbal disturbance." The other offices, however, provided
advice about how to run the whorehouse and conceal its operations, how
to deceive the Internal Revenue Service and how to smuggle the El
Salvadoran victims into the country.

The
resulting public furor resulted in the Census Bureau and the Internal
Revenue Service immediately severing their programs to pay ACORN for
"community outreach."

Yet
the White House still maintains close ties with ACORN. The director of
the White House Office of Political Affairs is Patrick Gaspard, who
formerly served as National Political Director for the Obama
presidential campaign.

A
Sept. 28 article in The American Spectatorby Matthew Vadum calls
Gaspard "ACORN's Man in the White House." The article notes that ACORN
founder Wade Rathke wrote that Gaspard once served as "ACORN New York's
political director." (Rathke later retracted the claim, and noted the
political trouble it was causing Gaspard.)

In
any case, Gaspard indisputably served as acting political director in
2006 for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), an
organization with such a tight working relationship with ACORN that some
local SEIU affiliates were actually run by ACORN. According to a July 9
article in the Washington Examiner, based on disclosure forms
filed with the U.S. Department of Labor, SEIU "contributed $7.4 million
between 2005 and 2008 to the national organization, state chapters and
allied groups" of ACORN.

SEIU,
like Bank of America, recently said that it has cut ties to ACORN.

Over
the years, ACORN has received tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer
funding. Indeed, this year the Department of Homeland Security granted
$997,402 to ACORN for the department's Fire Prevention and Safety
Program. This money has traditionally been allocated to organizations
that know something about fire safety, such as fire departments, which
use the money to distribute smoke alarms to poor people.

The
DHS grant to ACORN was rescinded in October after the bad publicity.
Additionally, there have been efforts in Congress to cut off all federal
funding for ACORN. As of this writing, however, none of them have become
law.

There's much more that could be written about ACORN's web of corruption
and its major and malignant influence in modern American politics.
Websites such as the Capital Research Center, Consumer Rights League,
BigGovernment.com, StopACORN.org and Discover the Networks have much
more detailed reporting on ACORN corruption.

ACORN has many friends in high
places. That's no surprise, since it put them there. Perhaps by this
time in 2010, ACORN will have weathered today's controversies and be
just as strong as ever, working hard against the Second Amendment.

Given the Obama-friendly media's
longstanding lack of interest in covering or investigating ACORN's
misdeeds, public pressure to cut off the taxpayer spigot for ACORN will
probably depend on genuine grassroots community organizers and
alternative media.

Make a donation to support Dave Kopel's work in defense of constitutional
rights and public safety.

Nothing written here is to be construed as
necessarily representing the views of the Independence Institute or as an
attempt to influence any election or legislative action. Please send
comments to Independence Institute, 727 East 16th Ave., Denver, Colorado 80203 Phone 303-279-6536. (email)webmngr @ i2i.org